Doing the best he can

Neighbors call John Waters honest, tenderhearted

MOSES LAKE - Moses Lake resident John Waters has tried to do the best he could.

He's made a decent living, been comfortable and not owed anybody any money.

"Just try to take care of my wife and do the best I can," he said. "In other words, have a half-decent home. I don't think a person could really ask for more than that in this life."

Born in Mocksville, N.C., Waters "got too smart" for the teachers in school, and was no longer interested. By "stretching the age limit a little bit," he went through basic training for the Marine Corps in South Carolina and shipped to Camp Pendleton in California.

Waters eventually obtained his high school diploma while in the Marine Corps, utilizing the special services unit.

He took tests for all the subjects, which were approved by the department, which in turn mailed the documents to the last school he had attended, and the superintendent of education in North Carolina authorized the principal to issue him a high school diploma.

Waters took several courses equivalent to junior college, including small business management and "managing the human resource," he remembered.

"I think these young people today should know the schools are not doing justice for them," Waters said. "When you can graduate from high school and not have to pass a math test, there's something wrong. You need math the rest of your life, regardless. And science. And world history. That seems to be a strange, forgotten subject from everybody I've talked to. I don't go into the schools now, but I don't hear good things."

By February 1946, Waters was shipped to Sasebo, Japan, then was transferred to what was then Tientsin, China, in June of that year until January 1947.

"When it was time to come home, they had lost my vaccination record," Waters remembered.

The Navy provided medical service for the Marine Corps, and a Navy lieutenant told Waters he would have to take the series of shots again or wait another three months to go home. Waters asked why he couldn't take all the shots at once.

"He said, 'You're going to be the sickest person ever thought about if you do,'" Waters remembered. "I said, 'Let's try it.' He said, 'Do you really want to try it?' I said, 'Yes.'"

Waters came down the next morning and took all of the shots, with the doctor's prediction he would be the sickest person ever by the next day.

"But I'd rather be that than stay another three months," Waters said. "I wouldn't advise people to do it because he probably knew what he was talking about, but fortunately, I didn't get sick."

Discharged after four years in the Marine Corps in Seattle, Waters said he fooled around until he ran out of money.

Waters' friend worked as foreman on a track repair crew for the Burlington Northern Railway, and Waters asked if he might be able to help him find a job.

"He said, 'Maybe in about a week,'" Waters remembered. "I said, 'I sure appreciate anything you can do, put my name in with somebody you know who might hire me.' About a week later, he came and said, 'You ready to go to work?' I said, 'Sure. When?' 'Tomorrow.' I said, 'Well, how'd you get me a job so fast?' He said, 'I had a guy who was no good, so I fired him to give you the job.' That's how I got started.

Waters began working on track repair before he transferred into the mechanical department for about 16 years. His first promotion sent him to Laurel, Mont., as a night shift supervisor.

"To pat my own back, just out of necessity, I could do every job in that department," Waters said. "I had all these young fellas and older foremen didn't want the young ones, they wanted guys who knew all the jobs, so I gladly took the young ones and made it a point to train these kids. It wasn't long. We had the most productive shift in the whole place."

Many of Waters' crew members were later promoted to supervisors.

Part of the job was to clean up train wrecks. Waters doesn't know how many he had to clean, but he remembered one particularly bad one where 17 cars derailed inside a tunnel, which meant it all had to be done by hand without the use of a crane.

"Dangerous, because you don't have much room between the side of a railroad car and the side of a tunnel," Waters said. "If something slips, you could be in some deep trouble. That was about the worst one I ever had. Nervous all the time. It's dark, damp and believe it or not, a tunnel is not straight. It's crowned, so that don't make things easier, because any water that accumulates has got to run out of there."

But Waters enjoyed the work. By the end of his career, he was working as a general foreman of the cars. He returned to Seattle in 1975.

The bad thing about the job was when Waters was on call 24 hours a day the last eight years of his 35 years with the company, he said.

Waters first arrived in Moses Lake with Annie in the winter of 1983. They had met at the railroad, when she was working in the office.

They had fished in the Mar Don Resort and Cascade Park areas, and liked the area enough to make the move when he retired.

"We had a lot of fun here," Waters said. "There wasn't much of a town, but you could buy groceries and cold beer."

The low cost of Moses Lake living drew the couple, and they decided when they settled it would be their ending place, he said, noting his mind has not been changed.

These days, Waters takes care of his "sweet little wife" of 38 years, Annie, and tends to his garden.

He grows bell peppers, cucumbers, beets, tomatoes, pole beans and kohlrabis, a part of the mustard family eaten as a vegetable, falling somewhere between a cabbage and a radish. Annie first asked him to grow kohlrabi because she loves it, but he had never heard of it before.

Waters also has another priority.

"Just try to keep my yard up so nobody drives by and says, 'Who lives in that dump?'" he said.

Stepdaughter Debra Hrdlicka said she couldn't have asked for a better stepfather. Waters takes good care of her mother, she said, so it's nice to know she and her sister don't have to worry about her.

"He's always been very generous and thoughtful," she said. "We've always been like his own kids, and that in itself I think says a lot."

Waters went 110 percent at his job with the railroad, Hrdlicka said.

"We're just glad he's a part of our family," she said. "He's a wonderful person to know and he would do anything for anybody. I know he's helped a lot of his neighbors out, cutting their grass, and goes out of his way to help people. He's very dependable."

"John is just a cool guy," echoed Diane Mayfield, Waters' other stepdaughter. "He's hardworking, his yard looks like a little park."

There's nothing out of the ordinary about Waters, Mayfield said, but the fact he's an average nice guy in a time when that appears to be a rarity.

"So often anymore people out there are not that way," she said.

Neighbors Vera and Frank Clem have known the Waters for 20 years. He was manager of the Broadway Estates complex when they first moved in right across the street, something Frank teases him about.

"I always accused him of quitting his job because we moved in, because he quit about a week later," Frank said. "The reason we moved in here was because I told my wife when we moved in here, 'I liked that manager.'"

Frank admires Waters' honesty.

"He's a man of his word," Frank said. "If he tells you something, that's the way it's going to be. He doesn't hinge any words, he'll just tell you flat out that's the way it's going to be. That's what I liked about him when we moved in here."

"He'll offer to help you in any way he can if you need help," Vera said. "He's just a real good person and we've enjoyed living across the street from them. We've talked to them a lot and share any news we have, and he and Frank solve a lot of big problems in the world together. It's been a good relationship."

But Vera thinks appearances can be deceiving.

"He gives you the appearance he's a stern person, but he's really just full of softness, a tenderhearted person," she said.